Viveca Rabb

From countryside dialects to Vaasa Swedish. Indications of dialect levelling and enregisterment of a town variety in four steps.

The aim of the study is to discuss changing indexicality and enregisterment of a Swedish dialect in western Finland. Indexicality is studied for the variety as a whole, rather than for individual dia-lectal traits. Fifteen women and 15 men born 1936-1997 from the town Vaasa and the neighboring municipality Korsholm were interviewed. The theoretical and methodological framework for the study was taken from sociolinguistics and perceptual dialectology. The informants show a collision of different indexical orders: while older informants tend to link Vaasa Swedish (VS) to the working class, younger ones tend to associate the variety with the whole town. In the first case, VS seems to index modesty and certain poverty, while in the second case, it indexes toughness, courage , aggression and self-confidence. The question of whether a moderate use of VS simply may index authentic Vaasa Swede is discussed. This would explain why women and younger people use the dialect less, perhaps being unwilling to be associated with toughness and aggression, while still wanting to be associated with the town and to call their own variety VS. The variety seems to be enregistered for younger informants, whereas older informants pick out certain working-class neighborhoods as bearers of a distinct dialect. The enregisterment of VS can be described as a four-step gradual movement from countryside dialects to working-class speech, and then from working-class speech in a certain neighborhood to a town dialect.

Keywords: enregisterment, indexicality, dialect levelling, perceptual dialectology, interviews, Swedish, Vaasa.
Språk & stil NF 26, 2016

The aim of the study is to discuss non-linguists' perceptions of the variation in spoken Vaasa Swedish and to compare their views with earlier results from an analysis of the linguistic production by the same informants (Rabb 2014). The perceptions of ten women and ten men born 1936–1997 in the town Vaasa in Finland were investigated. The theoretical and methodological framework for the study are inspired by work in sociolinguistics and perceptual dialectology. The perceptions seem to correspond well with the results from the informants' production results. According to the informants, the Vaasa Swedish spoken among older people differ depending on social class combined with regional aspects of the speaker. The Vaasa Swedish spoken by younger people functions as a linguistic resource to express toughness or closeness to one's conversation partner. Consequently , social class and neighbourhood are perceived to have less importance for younger speakers. The informants consider younger males to be more inclined to use Vaasa Swedish than females. All these perceptions supplement and correspond well with the results in Rabb 2014. Hence, the study of perception and the study of production complement each other and this combined methodology, therefore, needs to be tested further in future studies. The study also shows that the views of modern socio-linguistics, where language variation is seen as a result of active linguistic choices by the speakers, may reflect the views of the speakers themselves.

In this paper perceptions about the defining traits of the Swedish dialect of Vaasa in western Finland are described. The material consists of interviews from the year 2014 with 20 informants from Vaasa and 10 from Korsholm, born between 1936 and 1997. The theoretical and methodological approach consists of perceptual dialectology and cognitive sociolinguistics. The informants from Vaasa mentioned on average five traits each from the local dialect, while the informants from Korsholm mentioned two traits. The traits mentioned are mostly about pronunciation, lexical items and prosody, while mentions about morphology and syntax are scarce. The Vaasa informants seem to mention traits whose use vary within the town, while Korsholm informants do not mention traits they use themselves. The traits not mentioned are unusual in the town as a whole, used by old people or only in certain neighbourhoods. Together, the informants give an accurate view of the defining traits of Vaasa Swedish.